Together with the committee of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Paoyhan, Alianza Arkana presents Farmacia Viva Indígena (The Living Indigenous Pharmacy)! In the Amazon rainforest, many indigenous communities struggle to receive proper health care as it is financially and geographically inaccessible. Meanwhile, ancestral knowledge of medicinal plants is disappearing. Farmacia Viva Indigena is a project led by the committee of Paoyhan, a Shipibo-Konibo community in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. This project responds to the fundamental needs of the community to reconnect with their ancestral knowledge of medicinal plants, improve the quality of their healthcare and boost their local … Continue reading Farmacia Viva Indigena

by Verena Metz Zumarán Sunday the 11th of November, Paoyhan, Loreto,Perú Testing for Papanicolaou is very important, as it enables the doctor to diagnose any existent abnormalities in the cells of the cervix. If the abnormalities are not treated in time, they can cause different types of cancer. Alianza Arkana (AA) was able to persuade the Public Health Authorities to carry out this Papanicolaou Campaign. The objective was to get all the women of the community to participate, in order to then be able to treat the women prone to cervical cancer. This goal has been achieved, due to the … Continue reading Papanicolaou Campaing in Paoyhan

In many parts of the world, people buy their food products in either neighbouring markets or supermarkets. While we usually give the price of products a high degree of importance, we rarely stop to think of where the products come from. We are often more preoccupied by the economic value of the products than the process required to deliver our products (e.g sowing the seeds, harvest, transport etc). Historically, the Shipibo people of Santa Clara have produced their own food and thus only needed to buy complementary products from external sources. Nowadays, many factors, such as climate change, over-fishing and … Continue reading Grow and Cook: A Never Ending Cycle

This September 2018, after a very successful Hip Hop workshop, we continued our youth work in the community of Paoyhan. This time, we had fun by engaging in confidence-building exercises, and made an exciting excursion to the new “Farmacia Viva” project site, to connect them to their traditional medicine knowledge. After an incredibly successful Hip Hop workshop with three special guests from Lima, a beautiful spark was lit in Paoyhan. A clear moment of “before and after” happened, where after 3 intense days of songwriting, performance, instrument-playing, an evening show, movie nights, stencil-making, and screenprinting, the children and youth of … Continue reading Getting to know our Roots and Ourselves – Continuing to plant seeds of change with the youth of Paoyhan

By Ellen Zhang 2018 Summer Intern at Alianza Arkana and Harvard undergraduate student Last January in 2017, Alianza Arkana collaborated with the urban, nearby community of Bena Jema to run health literacy workshops for women. The workshops touched upon STDs, … Continue reading Plant Medicine and Gynecology Workshop

My name is Charlotte Biren, and I have been working at Alianza Arkana since September 2017 as the Communications Coordinator. I jumped into my work here and through the fluid natural of sharing responsibilities here, I began to support an … Continue reading ¡Non Kene Presente!

Written by Macarena Arias, Coordinator Villagers having breakfast before heading out After a successful workshop about regenerative solutions in the village of Paoyhan in 2017, the community decided to form a committee to steward 5 hectares of their community forest, … Continue reading Moving Forward in Paohyan

The following blog was written by Michael Coe, ethnobotanist and PhD Candidate at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. It is a good example of how Alianza Arkana and researchers work together in a collaborative way with Shipibo communities. It is … Continue reading Researching Medicinal Plants

As the year draws to a close we would like to list our twelve major achievements for 2017 in the key and overlapping areas of: working with communities; eco-social justice; work with young people. 1. We continued our work in … Continue reading Twelve Major Achievements 2017